RE the IT job market: Ace tech kid graduates with all the accolades and top of his class. Scores an interview with a top coding firm and blows confidently through every exec interview, one by one. He figures he's a shoe-in for this well-paid position; only one more interview. In comes the old crumbucket HR Director, who states "I only have one question for you. What would you say is your greatest weakness?"

Actually, if you wrap the water tankage around the living space, you can greatly attenuate the radiation threat. You need a fair amount of water but then you also need a long haul spacecraft so we might as well wish for both unicorns at once.

@RoryAlsop I guess I was more thinking in terms of organ function and overall durability/longevity

and the ability to replace parts since if you break your arm here you can spend a while resting and it'll heal, but if you break it out in space you instantly become a liability unless you have a large enough group to pick up the slack

and, additionally, structural reinforcement for things like your brain to resist the effects of high acceleration

A lot of those human factors issues are solved if you can maintain fairly steady acceleration. If you had a magic ship that could accelerate at 1g for a whole day, that’s a delta V of 864000 meters per second (or about 2 million mph). That simplifies a lot of the logistics enormously.

Real life moment: why do people force you to call them a liar to their face? “I never heard you say anything about Java 9!!!1!” “We talked about this in many meetings. I put it in all the release notes and the build summary write-ups. We talked about this during the last live test. You were sitting right next to me.”

@BobCross I think that's the only sensible way to do it. You start in Earth orbit, keep accelerating constantly up to the halfway point, then turn the ship round so the engines are pointing forward, and keep decelerating for the second half of the journey, until you drop into the orbit of your destination planet.

Continuous acceleration is surprisingly effective, even at low g. Remember that 1g steady acceleration gets you to a nominal 0.5c in a year. Yes, it’s more complicated with special relativity but you’ve already postulated a magic source of reaction mass....

of course all of this is back of the napkin because we're not taking into account the distance each planet is traveling during that time, for one, and I'm sure other factors I'm not personally aware of

@Myself I managed to get a year of quantum and astrophysics in at university because I had managed to be educated to 2nd year level through my school. It was fun, but the maths did get a bit brain frying

@RoryAlsop Kinda interesting. TLDR of the wiki article... They buy a "standard tire" from the government, then they take a fleet of cars and drive a 7200 mile circuit of roads in West Texas and compare the wear of their tires to the standard.

The cheapest tire isn't always going to be the cheapest per mile. A company with a large fleet like a taxi operation has the advantage of being able to try many different options to see what might end up being the cheapest overall choice. To get started in the right direction, in the US anyway,...

Yup - when I chat to young lads about car modding (happens a bit as I tend to have cars popular with boy racers) I point out that I first do tyres, then brakes, strut brace, then shocks...and only then power upgrades

Can somebody recommend a nice pick set? Amazon only leaves me the choice between some 99 piece sets made from Chinese flower wire and €60 glorious German picksets (made of gas turbine blades during a full moon night by a secret clan of mad Westphalian toolmakers, hardened with dragonfire and blessed by a Tibetan priestess)

@Ceshion actually, that sort of thing is an optimizing problem in the target motion analysis domain. A gradient search “guess and check” methodology will produce a useful approximate intercept solution pretty quickly. ... In other news, I am a huge nerd.

I think we can trust a manufacturer against itself for decent treadlife ratings. Another good measure is the warranty. If they off a 70k mile warranty, you should bet it's too g to last longer than a tire with only 40k

I don't know. I have opinions about certain brands which I won't buy. This taints my view of them, so it factors into the mix. I'm sure others have their opinions as well. Personally I probably wouldn't be comparing Dunlop or Bridgestone in the first place, because I wouldn't even be looking at them. I'm very opinionated about tires. Very few brands I'd even look at in the first place.

It doesn't mean my opinion is right for everyone, but it does work for me.

@Pᴀᴜʟsᴛᴇʀ2 Same for me. Since virtually nobody has a real possibility to test a wide selection he has to resort to other methods: gut feeling, price or test results from other sources. As for me I buy only Michelin

They had the truck up on the lift and was inspecting things. The wheels weren't spinning freely as you'd expect (brakes were dragging). So, I've ordered a new set of calipers. These are rebuilt ones, but were cheaper than new OEM ones. They have new guide pins in the caliper brackets, which I would have had to purchase as well.

@BobCross - It would only be dumb and bad if you actually purchased them for your car ... now, if you saw fit to order me the set, I'd have been Merry Christmas to Paul :o)

@JPhi1618 every system that we use at work forces everyone to acknowledge “this is not your computer. You are at work. This is our computer. Don’t put your personal stuff on here. Seriously, what is your problem? Use your own computer!”